Yes, it’s a tad late to be starting on my holiday baking, but I didn’t think it was such a hot idea to bake too much while I was regularly trying to cough up a lung. But my cough has finally waned, so I feel like I can bake without posting an “baked with love and germs” note on all of my baked goods.

I’ve been making marshmallow cream fudge since long before I knew much about cooking and if I tried a different recipe my family would probably up and move out of the house. I’m a fan of making things from scratch as much as I can and forgoing processed food full of preservatives as much as possible, but I absolutely make an exception for marshmallow cream fudge. I love how the fluffy stuff lightens up the confection and there seems to be enough non synthetic-chemical enhanced ingredients in the recipe to kill the chemical taste. I follow the recipe on the marshmallow cream jar with a few changes depending on the flavor. The first thing is that I use Ghiradelli chocolate. I fell in love with Ghiradelli when I went to San Fransisco when I was 21 and toured the Ghiradelli Chocolate Factory at Fisherman’s Wharf. Since then European baking chocolate has become pretty easy to find, even in most grocery stores and reasonably affordable. I’ve tried several different brands, but I always come back to Ghiradelli to make brownies and fudge (and their Sweet Ground Chocolate and Cocoa makes the best hot chocolate ever, in my opinion).

I use the 60% Cacao Bittersweet chocolate to make my dark chocolate fudge and their semi-sweet chocolate for the regular chocolate fudge and follow the general directions for Fantasy Fudge on the marshmallow cream jar (sans nuts, my kids are crazy, but not nutty). The white chocolate and peanut butter versions are a little trickier. Good white chocolate should have cocoa butter as the first listed ingredient (at least 20%). But that means it’s a lot softer and oilier than regular chocolate. So for the white chocolate and the peanut butter, I reduce the amount of butter and cook it a little longer.

Here’s the recipe with all the variations.

Marshmallow Cream Fudge

3 cups sugar – 21 0z

3/4 cup unsalted butter – 6 0z (no, I will not use margarine to bake or cook, ever) for chocolate or dark chocolate or

Break the chocolate into reasonably small pieces, they don’t have to be tiny by any means, your sugar syrup is going to be over 200 degrees, it will melt a good sized piece of chocolate. Ghiradelli baking bars can be broken into the squares marked on the bars. Set aside.

Now the recipe on the jar tells you to mix the sugar, butter and evaporated milk and bring to a boil, stirring constantly in a heavy saucepan over medium heat and cook for 5 minutes. This might get you the texture you want and then again it might not. In my case, usually not. If I don’t use a candy thermometer I almost always crystalize my sugar.

So I mix the sugar, butter, salt and evaporated milk in a heavy saucepan. Clip on my handy-dandy candy thermometer (I have a brand new digital one to try this year, I can’t wait) and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly with a silicon whisk and cook until it reaches the lower end of soft ball stage (which is 235-245 degrees) for chocolate or dark chocolate or the upper end for white chocolate or peanut butter . Then I add the chocolate or peanut butter and stir like fire with a wooden spoon for at least 3 minutes or until the mixture goes from shiny to matte (an Alton Brown trick to keep the sugar from crystalizing). Add the vanilla and the marshmallow cream, stirring until the marshmallow is mixed in (or not, it looks kind of neat all streaky). Add in the nuts if you got ’em and pour into an 8 x 8 or 9 x 13 in pan (I line mine with foil or waxed paper for easy removal and clean-up). Cool until it’s set and room temp all the way through. Cut into squares, eat and go into sugar shock.

Two of the above recipes are so easy that they don’t require a full post. My 6 layer bars are Magic Bars without, you guessed it, the nuts, which is why they only have 6 layers. I love this recipe, you don’t have to mix anything, you melt the butter in your baking pan, pour in the graham cracker crumbs, mix them with the butter, press into the bottom of the pan with a spoon, sprinkle the chocolate and butterscotch chips in the pan (I don’t even bother to measure them out, I use about half of a bag), sprinkle on the coconut, pour a can of sweetened condensed milk over the whole deal and bake them for half an hour at 350 degrees F. Voila and yum.

The apple sauce-cinnamon ornaments are a tradition in my house, we have to make new ones every couple of years because they aren’t terribly durable and we add new people to the family. You take equal amounts of cheap applesauce and cheap cinnamon (seriously, you’re not eating it, so don’t splurge on expensive Vietnamese cinnamon – generic will do fine). Stir the cinnamon into the applesauce until you have a stiff, but malleable dough. Throw in any old ground holiday spices you might have taking up space in your spice cabinet if you want to, ground ginger, ground cloves, allspice, nutmeg. If they’ve been in there for more than a year or two the smell will add a nice touch to the ornaments but probably won’t taste very good. Just make sure you are at about equal proportions apple sauce to spices. Roll the dough out to 1/4 – 1/8 of an inch and use holiday cookie cutters to cut out shapes. If you want to use them as ornaments use a straw to punch out a little hole in the top to thread a ribbon through. We write names on ours while they are still wet so everyone has a new ornament. You can even fancy them up and wait until they are dry and decorate with glitter. Some recipes say to just dry them for 24 hours on a cooling rack, but I prefer to to put mine in the oven at 150 degrees F for 2-3 hours until they are completely dried through and there are no damp spots in the middle. The cooking method makes them a bit more brittle, but the smell that infuses your house is worth it.

I’ll post the recipes for the rest of my list over the next few days. The snowball cookies are new for me, but the rest of them, I’ve made for years, though I haven’t decided what flavor of cheese cake to do yet, so that might end up being a new adventure since I’d like to try something different.

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About TaMara

What's to say? I love to cook and I think families benefit from sitting down together for dinner every night. I ran What's 4 Dinner Solutions menus service for many year. Soon those menus, recipes and shopping lists will be a series of cookbooks. Guaranteed to make it easier for families to have a quick, delicious and nutritious dinner each night.